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OldAsiaHand
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Posts posted by OldAsiaHand
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Haven't any of you guys worked out that you're having your leg pulled here? Jeez, can you be so hungry for conversation that you can't even smell BS when someone throws it at you anymore?
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The going rate for top-of-the-market condos in the very top buildings in the same area which are currently occupied is around B60,000 per square meter. New buildings will, if anything, be of an inferior construction standard given the rush by amateur developers (which certainly includes the constantly and continually bankrupt Raimon Land) to cut costs.
Thais simply refused to buy what they insist on calling 'used property' under any circumstances, which is why the condo maket here is headed straight for an early collapse circa 1997. For the life of me, I can't see why a foreigner would be sucked into buying a possibly inferior unit at a 25% premium just because it's 'new.'
If you're actually looking for a place to live and you don't thoroughly vet the property now on the market instead of focusing just on the developers hustling incomplete projects to naive Thais who think they're going to make a killing on them, you're making a serious mistake.
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If they're Americans, they'd probably find the Christmas buffet at Bourbon Street to be fun. It's first-come-first-served anyway, so the reservations thing is a nonissue. Bourbon Street is an okay place, a bit of a dive but in a nice way. It's owned by a guy from New Orleans and is really the only genuine American hang-out in Bangkok. An awful lot of embassy personnel go there as well as American military and cops out here on temporary duty.
The Christmas and Thanksgiving buffets are actuallly pretty good and not very expensive. There are a lot of expat families with kids and always big crowds. Maybe you'd better email Bourbon Street and make sure they're serving the buffet this year. Then you could also find out what time they start serving and plan to get there early.
You can check out http://www.bourbonstbkk.com/.
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That's absolutely the funniest thing I've ever read on this board......but, mate, I still reckon maybe you've got a bit too much time on your hands.
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If you're just looking for a place to live for the foreseeable future, you shouldn't worry about the day-to-day state of the market. My own guess is that you might be able to buy a little cheaper in a year or so (say, 10-12%), but it almost certainly won't be enough to make it worth playing the market if you want a place to live before that.
On the other hand, if what you're worried about here is the resale value at some future point, you should be. The detached home market is essentially limited to Thais because of the restrictions on land ownership. Yes, I know there are loopholes, but regardless, the only foreigners in the market as a practical matter are those long-term residents with Thai spouses who can afford detached houses and that's not a whole heck of a lot of those folks. Certainly not enough to constitution anything you can really call a market.
As you will read in plenty of other threads on this forum, Thais almost never buy 'used property.' I know that term sounds silly to a westerner, but it doesn't to a Thai. If a Thai can afford to move up to a bigger house, generally for the prestige of it, he wants a new house, not one somebody has already lived in. To buy 'used property' (house, car, etc) just seems to advertise that he can't afford new property, and where is the prestige in that?
My advice is to go ahead and buy the house whenever you like if you want to live in it here in Thailand for the foreseeable future, but understand that -- whenever you buy it -- you are almost certain to own it for a very, very long time ... if not forever.
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I'm no property expert, but i've just bought my first house and my wife informed me that most thai people keep their property for their whole lives, and then pass it on to their children - much like family businesses. iF they do sell, they sell to other family members - owning property and land seems to be like a status symbol to thai people, and the more they can get, the better their social standing. Also, thais like to buy new houses. Consequently, the thai property market is very slow compared to western countries. I think you would be better off renting out.
Yes, that's exactly right. Thais who claim to be real estate agents as a rule only make an effort to sell new condos, and when you bring up the need to sell your unit before you buy another, will tell you the same thing over and over: 'No one want used property.' For westerns that sounds so silly that we tend to shrug it off. Don't. It's absolutely true.
As for the rental market, it's just about as weak as the sale market. There is simply so much inventory and so much talk that the market is terrible and getting worse that no one is doing much of anything but waiting for it to hit bottom. When will that be? The convential wisdom now is several years. That may be nonsense, of course, but people tend to believe what they hear over and over, so it may turn out that way regardless.
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Well, let me tell you this, my condo is not high-end or large. Its a small one-bedroom that I would ask around 2-2.5 million Baht for. Is there no market for this at all?????
I really don't have any experience with that specific sort of property in the neighborhood where you are, so I'm not sure my opinions should be given much weight here.
You should understand, however, that the residential property market in Bangkok is very, very weak right now as an overall matter. That's partly because of the large number of new buildings coming on stream over the next twelve to twenty-four months, and partly because there is a perception afoot in the land that prices will be falling soon. Maybe by a whole heck of a lot.
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The Conrad has a serviced apartment block right in All Seasons that is quite nice. They have a web site somewhere. Run Google for the Conrad Bangkok and you'll get to it.
As for commercial real estate sites that will show you current rentals, sorry, no. The real estate business in Thailand isn't nearly that professional. Oh, you'll find properties on some sites (try, for example, www.AndrewPark.com), but as a rule local real estate sites are poorly maintained and seldom updated. And, on top of that, most rentals are handled personally, not through agencies with web sites. Wait until you get here and look in the Bangkok Post. The online Post is useless for ads, but the print version is loaded every Monday and Friday.
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Just found that other thread I was talking about right below this one. Look at...
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OldAsiaHand,
Whats your opinion of the liquidity at the upper end of the market.
Zero. Nada. Forget it.
Several months ago you would hear around the traps that ... maybe ... there were a few sales taking place involving small units (one bedroom and studio) at the upper end of the market, but no more. The general view now is that anything above, say, six million is dead dead dead. And it's going to get deader. (That may not be a real word, but in this context at least, it should be.)
There's a current thread somewhere around here -- in the General section, I think -- about a planted piece that turned up recently in the IHT claiming that the residential market apartment was booming in Thailand and that condos were selling like hotcakes. Read the posts there in response to that considerable load of <deleted>. You'll get a feel for how deep the real negativity runs.
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Nobody has info on this? Surely some of you have dealt with Real Estate people in BKK?
Yes, I have, and I can't recommend any of them to you.
This isn't the US. It isn't even the UK. There's no liquid market for residential property here and no listing system at all. There are also no listing agents in the western sense. The name agencies all deal exclusively with major developers who are now desperate to sell their incomplete buildings. You unit will be in competition with those projects (on which they get bonus commissions) so they will make no effort at all to sell it. The little local agents that don't have deals with developers are generally both lazy and stupid, so you can forget them as an alternative. All they will do is tell you 'no one want used property.' Which, at least as applied to Thais, is true.
Call them all up and they will put you apartment in their books. Then if anyone comes in and demands to buy it, they will sell it to them, but that's all they will do. Do you have any idea how many abandoned residential units there are in Bangkok that foreigners have just walked away from because they can't sell them? Now you do.
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Yep, you're both right. Le Raffine has been a well-known and much chuckled about dog on the condo sales market in Bangkok for quite a while. The real question here, of course, is how much it cost the Le Raffine developers to get Crispin to plant that piece in the IHT. I suppose the guy could just be dumb and have gotten taken in, but does anyone really believe that?
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Confidentiality is a quaint and almost wholly inaccurate concept with respect to international banking these days. Don't use an offshore bank because you're looking for secrecy. It doesn't exist. A blizzard of anti-avoidance legisation from tax collection agencies all over the world fatally wounded it in the 90's and then the stricter banking regulations post-9/11 finisihed it off. Today it's a dead issue everywhere.
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I'd suggest you check with some people who know before you rely on any of this.
Every real estate professionall in town will tell you the same thing: the residential real estate market, particularly at the top end, is in a state of total collapse. An 'reservations for unbuilt condos trading at a premium to their asking prices?' 'A new property boom is underway?' That's just baloney. This guy Crispin has long had a reputation as a sloppy reporter and this latest gem is a prime example why that is. Take a handful of developer press releases, stir liberally with beer and BS, and voila! A totally misleading story.
'Nobody is taking about a repeat of the 1997 collapse?' Heck, man. Nobody who knows is talking about anything else.
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Banks do not devalue properties in my experience. If the Bank values a property at half the price I'm paying, I'd presume I was getting screwed by the sellor, not the bank ! Good luck.
You really haven't had much experience have you?
Thai banks have firm guidelines for every condo building in town that, at least with respect to the ones I've actually seen, average about half of the current fair market value in those buildings. The reason for that, of course, is these banks want to increase their margin on the loan, just in case it goes bad. Like most Thai companys, they would prefer to do that in a face saving way -- i.e. by lowballing the valuation -- rather than being straight up about it and telling you they want to lend you less.
Any property agent in town can give you a very close guideline to the real market value of most any property: a class A building in lower Suk being B65-75,000 per meter, a class B in upper Suk being B45-50,000 per meter, raw land between Suk 37 and Suk 55 being B100-120,000 per rai and so on. You can count on the bank giving you a value of 50%-60% of that amount on the condos and nothing at all on the raw land.
That's not evidence that you're being 'screwed by the seller' since everybody in town knows what the real market value is of almost everything. It's just the way business is routinely conducted by the banks here. They're not your pal, friend.
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stickmans site is tedious, not only hard on the eyes but a lot of crap stories too. And stickmans wife seems to be telling him how to think and write these days.
Why in the world has it recently become so fashionable to try and demonstrate one's hipness by peeing on Stickman?
The fellow is just an ordinary, decent guy and, at least from the point of view of someone who has lived in this place for some twelve years, Stick knows Thailand. At the very least, Stick knows more about real expat life in Thailand than most of those self-anointed experts who love to blinther away here about how clued in they are. Maybe he's not all that hip, it's true, but he knows what he's talking about. I can't say the same for a lot of the rest of you.
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Does anyone know of any websites for house rentals in the Ekamai area? I'm on secondment for 2 years, have a young family and can go up to 60k month.
Thanks.
Knowing this board, I'm no doubt going to get pissed on for this, but I live in that area presently and do have some current experience with the prices.
In the Ekamai-Thonglor area for B60,000 you will have a very difficult time finding a fully equipped apartment large enough for a family of four that is of a good western standard. I'd say B90,000 would be a more reasonable budget. Whether it's justified or not, Ekamai-Thonglor is both stylish and hot at the moment and property owners are expecting to get top baht for large apartments,
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Hi all
Wonder if anyone can help,
I was told i could get a 70% mortgage by my lawyer but am now told sorry only 50% for a farang.
Thai banks love to play games with loan to value ratios for residential properties, and they do it whether you're a Thai or a foreigner, so regardless, don't take the percentage they're tossing out too seriously.
Banks will say they're giving you a 100% or 80% or 50% loan, but then they will value the property at half of what you are paying for it and you end up with a much, much smaller loan than you expected. This happens without exception. The way you deal with it is to ignore the percentage until they value the property, then you continue to ignore the percentage and the property valuation and try to negotiate the gross loan amount itself as a specific dollar figure.
Sometimes it even works.
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Are you sure? I have never seen Dr. Pepper anywhere in Thailand, except for in the commissary of the US Embassy.
Me neither and I've looked. So far I've always managed to talk a friend at the embassy into bringing me a few six-packs when my supply runs low, but I'd love to have an alternate source.
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Would Thailand or American customs have any problem with all these boxed goods in my luggage?
Thanks.
Thai customs certainly won't care. As for US Customs, as long as the total value of the parts fits within your import exemption, they won't care either. If you could scare up some 'receipts,' to help establish the value of the parts, particularly in that you say they look new, that would no doubt be useful in speeding your clearance.
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Lord help us.
No wonder Thais, on the whole, think of foreigners in Thailand as just a bunch of stupid <deleted>. drunken misfits, and all around losers. Guys like this sure make their point for them, don't they?
This idiot reminds me, yet again, why I am so frequently embarrassed to be a foreigner in this country.
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Didn't you find anything more boring to talk about?
Come on. Don't be a jerk. An awful lot of expats are concerned about issues of daily life here, and where to send their kids to school certainly looms large among those issues.
If you're not interested, go away; but don't pee on people who have interests that are more substantive than tonight's price for a blow job.
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The vise president of CP petro once told me he couldn't fire anyone in his 3000 man company
If he did he would probably be found dead in two weeks. And this was a Chinese Thai man with a lot of influence.
That's a common issue here. Remember the Australian auditor who was murdered a year or two ago up country? Remember the on-going TPI upheavals and the threats to the receivers that caused several to leave the country?
Post-1997, I was brought in to reorganize and run a reasonable sized financial services company in Bangkok. The reorganization eventually included terminating a half dozen members of middle management who had been scamming the company in various ways and restructuring the business in partnership with a major European bank.
I thought the whole matter had worked out without much fuss until long after we had sold the company and I had left. That was when my wife told me about the army security unit she had hired through her family contacts to cover my ass while I was doing all that. She had been told by friends that a hitter had been hired by someone who wanted to kill the deal, literally in this case, and a police friend of my father-in-law's had found this hitter following me around Bangkok on a motorbike.
After the army guys were brought in, they picked up the hitter. I'm told they had a serious talk with him and, gee, he must have gone back to his village since no one has seen him since. They also said they had some more serious talks with the folks who had hired him and then covered me twenty-four hours a day for another month until my wife was sure I was safe.
Of course, I found out about absolutely none of this for several years after it happened.
The lesson is this: we live here in a world we can never even hope to see clearly, let alone understand. That applies to everyone, even you guys who love to sound so smug about the presumed cultural sophistication and sensitivity you have accumulated during your time here. If you really do believe you have even the slightest idea what is actually happening around you, I wish you the very best of British luck.
As the old desk sergeant on Hill Street Blues used to remind his patrol cops before every shift, 'Be careful out there.'
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What a strange list...
For as long as I can remember, many decades certainly, the International School of Bangkok (better known as ISB) has been widely accepted as the leading American-system school in Thailand while Bangkok Pattana has been accepted as the leading British-system school.
Yet you left off both of those schools completely and included instead all the third-rate entrepreneurial hustles being hyped by their Thai-family owners trying to make a quick buck. Very odd indeed.
Thai National Opening Us Bank Account
in General Topics
Posted
In general, it should be no probelm at all. When you are in the US, just pick out a bank you like and go in. You certainly don't have to be a resident or a citizen of the US to open a bank account. While it is true that banks are supposed to require you to have a social security number to open an account, a great many will waive it for 'non resident aliens' if you just show your passpost for identification and ask them to.
If the bank you want to use won't waive it, it's still no problem. The social security administration issues social security numbers on request for non-residents who need them for ID. Some states, for example, use your social security number for their driver's licenses and it's very common for non-residents to request a number for ID. Do that, then take the number to the bank where you want to open an account and that will be that.
It's not at all like Thailand. No nonsense about work permits and that you can only have a certain kind of account since you're a foreigner. Just identify yourself to the bank's satisfaction and they will gladly open any kind of account for you that you want.